Sometimes you just run into stuff. No expectations, just Boom! There you are. Sue and I were on our honeymoon in 1976 and had wandered into Telluride, Colorado in our 1972 Fiat 128. At the time, we didn’t know that Telluride was soon to become a low rent Aspen, with a lot of phoney-baloney California types with pretentions to the Aspen lifestyle. On our way out of town the next morning we ran across this unique homestead. What you are looking at are tiles composed of Colorado license plates. This guy must have worked for the Colorado DMV since all of the plates are all consecutively numbered.

Each year a different color.

Fun stuff. I don’t know whether this homestead still exists, but it was cool in 1976.

As I posted just above pictures of it were uploaded to facebook about a week ago. It is surprising how well the license plates have held up as they are now over 50 years old and the sun does quite a number on paint at that high of an altitude not to mention the snow they get there. Apparently it was done to attract customers to it when it was a museum of sorts. Based on the FB photos I’d say they had access to the plates used for setting up the machines and the ones that didn’t get used up. Back in the day it was common to get new plates every year and the color let the police know that you had current plates instead of stickers as are the common practice now.

You know, speaking of Telluride, a great vacation for anyone here would be booking a room up there and spending a week driving about with camera in hand. In the vein of old sleds in semi-fine fettle, Western Colorado could give Eugene a good run for the money, with special emphasis on Montrose, Delta, San Miguel, and Montezuma counties. To wit…

This is only scratching the surface. No state inspection, low humidity, and sand down for bad weather equals some long-lived stuff, which isn’t necessarily always a good thing. Would that I had the time to pick one and bang out a proper CC…

If anybody is touring Colorado’s Western Slope, a stop in Delta is a absolute necessity for CCheads. The attached shot was taken off of US 50 in Delta last summer where an impressive collection of aged sheet metal awaits outside a former gas station.

The Licence Plate buildings in Telluride were my Grandparents garage and a museum/rockshop. These photos are great because they are on the original grounds and have since been moved elsewhere. (Their house is not even in town any longer!) All the plates came from the county courthouse. My grandpa worked in the courthouse in the evenings. HIs day job was a Miner.